Saturday, May 22, 2010

The Misandry Bubble - Part 6!

Welp, I've gotten this far. In for a penny, hung for a sheep, or something like that.

Hence, there will be no real Men's Rights Movement in the near future. The misandry bubble will instead be punctured through the sum of millions of individual market forces.And now he gets into pseudoeconomics, which is almost like pseudoscience, except instead of saying "cavemen passed on their genes by only fucking swimsuit models" you say "it's economically rational for a man to only fuck swimsuit models." God damn that Freakonomics book, by the way--it's interesting in itself, but it taught a million armchair economists that you can prove anything "economically" by carefully selecting which incentives you consider and which you completely fucking ignore. It's economically rational for me to cut off my feet because then I won't have to buy socks!

Misandrists shriek about a supposed 'glass ceiling' of pervasive sexism that explains why 50% of the CEOs of major corporations are not women. What is never mentioned is the equally valid 'glass floor', where we see that 90% of imprisonments, suicides, and crippling occupational injuries are of men.Here we see the logical Fallacy Of Buh?, in which the premise and conclusion are from different planets.

One of the most dishonest myths of all is the claim that 'women earn just 75% of men for the same job'.That's a misphrasing. Women earn 75% of men for the same hours. It's true, female surgeons and stockbrokers earn about the same as male surgeons and stockbrokers (actually often they don't, but anyway), and male housekeepers and nannies earn the same as female housekeepers and nannies. But if you look at the numbers of men and women in various professions this doesn't work out nearly even, and claiming women voluntarily choose low-paid careers for some mysterious lady reason makes pretty poor argument-spackle.

It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do. It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds. Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination? Because in 18 years I still won't be a man.

If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors. Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit?This hypothetical (and male!) CEO can't just hire the cheapest possible labor for executive and management positions, he has to hire experienced and qualified people even if they cost more. Whoops, they all turned out to have penises, what a crazy random happenstance.

Furthermore, women entrepreneurs could hire other women and out-compete any male-dominated business if such a pay gap existed, but we do not see this happening in any country in the world.It actually is, slowly, but:A) Since feminism isn't actually the mirror-image of misogyny, most female businesspeople don't hire 97% female management.B) Most entrepreneurs don't start in a garage and work their way up with no help from anyone on sheer merit and spunk. Business experience and contacts are invaluable, and they're disproportionately available to good ol' boys.

I am willing to pass laws to ensure that 50% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are women (despite the accelerated turnover this would create in the ranks of the Fortune 500), if we also legally mandate that 50% of all imprisonments are of women, and 50% of the jobs that involve working with heavy machinery, being outdoors in inclement weather, inhaling toxic fumes, or apprehending dangerous criminals are also occupied by women. Fair is fair. Any takers? Um... yeah. I would take that deal. Except for the imprisonments because that's the Fallacy of Buh?, but the rest of it, that sounds just fine. (I've already worked in inclement weather and I still work with dangerous criminals; for some reason the typical female job of lying on a couch eating bon-bons didn't have any openings when I applied.)

In the recent recession and ongoing jobless recovery, the male unemployment rate continues to be much higher than the female unemployment rate. Yeah, that's because all the good jobs went away first.

Traditionally female jobs tend to be low-paid and low-status, but necessary: childcare, healthcare. The demand for manufacturing and construction is dependent on the economy, but kids and sick people are always around. These sectors don't have big failures but they also don't have big successes--there'll never be a "Childcare Boom." So there's no childcare recession, but that doesn't mean that babysitters rule the economy now.

The 'mancession' continues as the US transitions to a 'sheconomy', and among the millions of unemployed men, some owe prohibitive levels of 'child support' despite not being the ones wanting to deprive their children of a two-parent household, landing in prison for lack of funds. Furthermore, I emphasize again that having 10-30% of the US male workforce living under an effective 70% marginal tax rate will kill their incentives for inventing new technologies or starting new companies. It is petty to debate whether the top federal income tax bracket should be 35% or 39.6%, when a slice of the workforce is under a 70% tax on marginal income.Mancession? Sheconomy? This guy could write for Cosmo.

And you do realize that if your children lived with you, you'd still have to clothe and feed them? Ideally.

The next time you hear someone say that 'the US has the largest prison population in the world', be sure to mention that many of these men merely lost their jobs, and were divorced against their will. The women, in the meantime, are having a blast.So apparently when you get divorced you go to prison. This is, uh, new.

I know he's really just bitching about his child support payments again, but in every state I could Google, you don't get imprisoned for Nonsupport Of A Child if you simply didn't have the income. You can be made to pay a portion of unemployment benefits, which I admit sketches me out a little (although less so when I consider that the kids still have to eat, and if the dad is broke but still ordered to pay, the mom's probably dead broke), but you can't go to prison for failing to produce blood from a stone.

Anyway what goddamn proportion of the prison population is there for Nonsupport Of A Child, seriously. I couldn't find statistics but I seriously doubt this is the root of America's entire crime problem.

It goes further. The vast majority of social security taxes are paid by men, but are collected by women (due to women living 7 years longer than men on average). [...] Remember again that the earnings of men pays 70%-80% of all taxes."Men don't earn more than women! And since men earn more, we have to pay more taxes! No fair!"

There's a long segment about why feminists are responsible for high taxes (they just are) that makes less than no sense and it's very boring, so I'm going to skim over that bit if you don't mind.

A single man does not require much in order to survive. Most single men could eke out a comfortable existence by working for two months out of the year.Well, not in the beloved Past, not unless you can find me a crop that ripens in two months and is nutritionally balanced and perfectly storeable. But in more modern times, the median individual income of a man--not counting zero incomes--in the US is about $30,513. (And of a woman--still not counting zero, remember, so it's not all housewives--is $17,629. But anyway.) Two months of that is $5,086. $424 a month. That's not a "comfortable existence," that's a van down by the river.

The reason that a man might work hard to earn much more than he needs for himself is to attract a wife amidst a competitive field, finance a home and a couple of children, and ultimately achieve status as a pillar of the community. [...] 80-90% of a man's output went to people other than himself, but he got a family and high status in return, so he was happy with the arrangement. If women would only marry rich pillar-y men, doesn't that mean that like 80% of women had no one to marry? Clearly someone was settling (or, ohmigosh, failing to gold-dig in the first place), or there'd be no such thing as a poor family.

It's also kind of harsh to describe your income as going to "people other than himself," and grudgingly consider the value received in return, when it's your own wife and kids. Life must be sad when you live on The Planet Without Love.

Hey kids, it's GLORIFYING MASS MURDER TIME!(This is quoted from a different essay, but the Misandry Bubble guy gives his explicit agreement to these specific quotes.)A man like George Sodini, who listened to his cultural elites and followed their dictates to the letter only to get swindled, had no reason to love America. In fact, he had every reason to lash out at the society that screwed him over and make its denizens feel some of the pain that they had inflicted on him.You could stop this madness tomorrow by refusing to follow your vaginas straight into the arms of scumbags, and actually live up to your claims of wanting nice guys – but I doubt you will. You’ve made your bed, ladies – now sleep in it.WHAT THE FUCK IS FUCKING WRONG WITH YOU WHAT THE FUCK I CAN'T EVEN BE FUNNY HERE FUCK. All this cute little talk about divorce laws and tax rates and TV characters means fucking nothing if you're going to justify murder. Holy shit. You don't want to be called a misogynist because it's a mean word that hurts your little feelings and you don't see a problem with killing women?

You know, there's a word for fucking a guy just so he doesn't kill you. I believe we were talking about it earlier? Starts with an R.

49 comments:

What this dude seems to have over-looked in his obviously thorough historical research, is that at the time of industrialization, women did work dangerous factory jobs, and industrialists did cut costs by hiring just women. What changed was that male workers unionized and demanded a "family wage" so that male workers could support a wife and kids on their own, and they wouldn't have to compete with women in the labour market.

And feminists do talk about the perils of masculinity, and how men are more prone to be killed at work, in war, by crime, or just due to reckless behaviour that is considered "manly". It's traditional masculinity that puts men in these positions.

I bet this guy is white. That he wants to misrepresent the USA's incarseration problem, and claim it as part of his oppression as a man who evidently thinks children are dolls without any human needs, so child support is just a huge scam to get money from him, is disgusting. The USA's prisons are full because the "War On Drugs" in the War on urban African Americans. Prisons are full of black men, mostly on drug-related charges. The criminal law approach to regulating narcotics (as opposed to a harm reduction approach through the health care system) is part of the systemic oppression of black people, and has nothing to do with his divorce. That he is appropriating their oppression is just a blatent expression of his privilege and sense of entitlement.

Remember back at the beginning, when he was writing about how there are no men in the movies? this video does a pretty good job arguing otherwise.

You could stop this madness tomorrow by refusing to follow your vaginas straight into the arms of scumbags, and actually live up to your claims of wanting nice guys – but I doubt you will.

I always suspected that Bubblehead wrote this manifesto because he was angry at not getting laid, but this pretty much clinches it.

The hilarity lies in the fact that he just spent all this time calling women stupid, manipulative, responsible for all the evils of society, and deserving of beatings or even death - and now he's like "Why don't women want nice guys like meeeeeeeeeee?!?"

A man like George Sodini, who listened to his cultural elites and followed their dictates to the letter only to get swindled, had no reason to love America.

Is he referring to the fact that, when police went into Sodini's home after the incident, they found a bunch of PUA books? Are his "cultural elites" the PUAs who tricked him into believing he could score with hot babes, but when he followed all the tenets of Game it (gasp) didn't work?

Because this would indicate to me that treating women like trophies/fucktoys/alien robots is a bad thing that is counterproductive and ends up hurting everyone.

Marissa - The guy actually specifies that he's Indian-American. However, his "prisons are all about divorce" perspective still displays a total failure to see beyond the end of his nose.

Anon - For some horrible reason, the more extreme PUAs and MRAs have posthumously adopted Sodini as one of their own and have woven this whole narrative of "this is what bitches have driven good men to!" around him.

It gives them a great way to implicitly threaten women with murder, without coming out and saying so--if you don't give yourself completely to any guy who feels he deserves you, murder is just what happens, see?

The reason the US has a ludicrous prison population has a lot to do with the remarkably lucrative-for-criminals-and-prisons "War On Drugs" (and to a lesser extent other consensual crime, but that's pretty trivial overall, it's just my hobbyhorse) plus some serious racism problems that interact with said War On Some Drugs. Not only can you not get alimony and childcare from a stone, it doesn't get produced on coca plantations either!

I am ... well, y'know, not actually able to be surprised that someone thinks that "scumbags are the ones who get laid" is why the mass murderers snap for lack of fuckable property. I think I must be jaded. :/

I have several (non-mutually-exclusive) hypotheses about what leads loser men to assert "women don't really want nice guy, they want scumbags." In bubble boy's case I'm going to go with "he defines 'scumbag' as anyone who doesn't follow generic rules laid out in some book."

Misandrists shriek about a supposed 'glass ceiling' of pervasive sexism that explains why 50% of the CEOs of major corporations are not women. What is never mentioned is the equally valid 'glass floor', where we see that 90% of imprisonments, suicides, and crippling occupational injuries are of men.Is he trying to imply that women imprison men for kicks, or does he genuinely not realize that on the whole, it's criminals who go to prison, and non-criminals who don't?

So apparently when you get divorced you go to prison. This is, uh, new.Only if you're also unemployed, I think.

Two months of that is $5,086. $424 a month. That's not a "comfortable existence," that's a van down by the river.Ok, when I was living alone, I spent ~$100/week for groceries. So that's $5,200 a year right there.

I could probably have survived on $10,172 per year, if I hadn't been in a long-distance relationship and gone to where she lived a few times. Oh, no, wait, my rent was $10,800 a year. Turns out I actually needed my full year's pay after all.

If there were all these educated and rational people who support his ideas, and have read his article, you'd think that at least *one* of them would have told him that 'Pavlovian response' doesn't mean what he thinks it means.

Hershele - I think "scumbags get laid" comes not from a misunderstanding of scumbaggery but of niceness. A guy is "nice"--that is, deliberately and awkwardly solicitous, not nice--to girls and it fails to get him a submissive gorgeous girlfriend in the first week, so he decides that niceness doesn't work and he better do the opposite.

Basically, in these guys' minds the only options are to be nice and earn the sex you deserve, or be a scumbag and demand the sex you deserve. The whole idea of sex as a pleasant activity rather than a tension-fraught transaction doesn't exist on their planet.

$100/week for groceries? I don't mean to be all judgey, I don't have a great diet, but I spend like $35/week on groceries and then maybe another $25 on takeout or restaurant meals.

...Which means that even eating substantially less or crappier than you, I still need $3,120 a year just to eat.

There is reasonable law and policy conversation to be had about child support laws and jailing non-paying fathers. I have a lot of concerns with the whole system, in a "we're not supposed to have debtor's prison" sense and in an unintended consequences sense (going to jail for 30 days at a time for non-support makes a man a lot less employable, often all but forcing him to go off the grid, and often putting the mother in the position of "sending" him to jail). There has *got* to be a better way to take care of children and encourage family bonds than to hold the threat of jail over heads of poor, frequently unemployed men. And you cannot talk about how child support policy affects poor men without looking at how drug policy affects poor men, as other commenters have mentioned. (Look at me! A woman having empathy for men!)

So when women greatly exaggerate the incidence of rape, they do an injustice to real victims.

I notice that ugly women like Holly are the ones obsessing over the notion that rape is common, but beautiful woman (you know, the ones men would actually be attracted to), never make a fuss about rape.

Where are all the hotties who have been victims of rape.

Hence, it is pretty obvious that ugly women whine about rape because they desperately want to claim that they are attractive to men, when they aren't.

Tat only ugly women ever complain about rape is a dead giveaway that the true crime of rape, while heinous, is also very rare.

Honestly, the entire MB thing is so out there, so incredibly inanely insane, I fail to find any interest or intrigue in it. The fact that anyone believes this is about as relevant to my interests or concerns as white supremacists and feminazis... or reptilian shapeshifters, for that matter.

Holly has the right of it when she says that anyone involved in the conversation has already lost; that any attempt to address the issue with logic is beside the point, and that "You're a poopy-head" is pretty much the only response worth issuing.

Not that what I say matters; after all, I'm a male who gets laid, so I'm obviously an Alpha asshole. See, I even come pre-trolled. Poopy-heads.

@chiThere has *got* to be a better way to take care of children and encourage family bonds than to hold the threat of jail over heads of poor, frequently unemployed men.

More structural support for primary caregivers. Accessible daycare, guaranteed parental leave and flex hours, etc. Policies that encourage employers to hire and promote primary caregivers, and to remunerate homemakers and primary caregivers for the valuable unpaid labour they perform.

I've had internet arguements (on Yahoo!Answers - a great place to argue with assholes) on the proposition that if women can choose to have abortions, then men shouldn't be forced to pay child support for unplanned children. And I realized that despite the assholishness of the dudes I was arguing with, it's true that men in such situations don't get to decide that they don't want to be parents. But the government has an interest in keeping people off welfare, and hence passes the costs off to individuals who may never be interested in having a parental relationship with the children they support. And it's unfair to force primary caregivers (typically women) to be economically dependent on dickwads that they'd probably rather never see again.

Either the state, or individuals, have to be responsible for the costs of raising a child. If MRAs don't want to absorb that cost, they should be advocating for publicly funded daycare and healthcare, and family-friendly workplaces.

I notice that ugly women like Holly are the ones obsessing over the notion that rape is common, but beautiful woman (you know, the ones men would actually be attracted to), never make a fuss about rape.

Either the state, or individuals, have to be responsible for the costs of raising a child. If MRAs don't want to absorb that cost, they should be advocating for publicly funded daycare and healthcare, and family-friendly workplaces.

How about women taking responsibility for their own actions? Yeah right, and Marissa is a beauty.

If women are incapable of being responsible for their own actions, then women should not be allowed to vote either, by your logic.

I don't know what Marissa looks like, but I always thought it was kind of a pretty name. :)

As for the rest, do you not want anyone to have children, or do you merely think childrearing should be limited to people who have husbands that can afford to support them as full-time housewives and are 100% sure that the husband will stay with them and not lose his income?

Conservatives actually say that it IS useful, and should take precedence over working (particularly if the woman in question is demanding that the employer bend over backwards to accomodate her). Actually, it appears that even the MB article says it is useful. That is the takeaway I get from his table of reproduction.

So you should be angry at feminists.

or do you merely think childrearing should be limited to people who have husbands that can afford to support them as full-time housewives and are 100% sure that the husband will stay with them and not lose his income?

That is how it worked for most of history (you would know this if you actually read a history book). Ever been to a red state? People have two parents there, you know.

I have a real job, and I don't think businesses need to give handouts to single mothers, but I don't think they should discriminate against them in employment either. Meaning that legally they shouldn't be able to play the "I bet she'll always be gone with the kids, better not hire her" game at hiring, and although I would not support childcare benefits as compulsory I think that it's very nice--and not always financially harmful--when businesses make reasonable accommodations for parents.

There's also the fact that kids, once born, have to be cared for, and tsk-tsking about "shouldn't have done that, slut" won't make the kid go away. So unless you're in favor of imposing bullshit "consequences" on children, someone has to support their care.

Ummmm women don't reproduce through cell division. A chick who has a baby has (most of the time, anyway) done so as a mutual decision with her partner.

I'm pissed that I could get a year off work, partially paid, to squeeze out and care for a baby but not to write a novel or travel around the world (why should I get punished for choosing not to have kids?), and the world is overpopulated so it'd be nice if everyone stopped pumping out the babies anyway. But the fact remains that all this baby-having requires men, and is not therefore a woman's decision/mistake/whatever.

Nooo, while feminists argue that women shouldn't be confined to the home, and should follow the career path of their choosing, they also argue that that an element of patriarchy is the devaluing of work traditionally performed by women, specifically care and support work and domestic labour.

You are in fact devaluing domestic labour and caregiving yourself, by suggesting that it's not a "real job". An unpaid homemaker does over $100, 000 worth of work a year, and makes a vital contribution to the economy.

I'm not going to bother answering every ad homenym you throw at me. Think what you want, I don't care.

Do you realize you just advocated letting a child suffer to teach an irresponsible woman a lesson???You can't go back in time and keep the woman from making that mistake, and letting a child be hurt will not undo the woman's mistake. All it will do is create TWO ruined lives, including one innocent one.

(Btw, I don't agree with the "responsibility/consequence" language of female sexuality being used here; i'm just using it to prove the point that this argument is total BS.)

Perhaps if you ever got a man, you might have direct experience [with tricking a guy into impregnating me].

I just finished saying that I don't want kids. I also said that most other women have them by mutual agreement with their partners (which means, for those of you who need to be spoonfed the obvious, that I'm so disinclined to "trick" a guy into breeding that I can't imagine anyone else doing it, either) - but you feel that "if I had a man" I'd suddenly start siphoning his cold dead sperm out of used condoms in an attempt to get knocked up?

Ooookay. Yes, clearly I am the one who has problems with logic. Indeed.

I do have a man, btw. I'm gonna close my laptop now and go back to having my feet rubbed. :)

Jack? Is that you?***Jesus Christ, Holly, I know you don't know me THAT well, but give me a little more credit, eh?

I not only know how to spell whose, I also wouldn't want to be the pied piper for the sorry assholes who eat this shit up and start to think that, y'know, maybe a LITTLE bit of rape might be okay. Just to let women know they're not gonna get away with being so (notsleepwithme) evil. I'm all for comedy, even if it's about human suffering (aww, Hell, who am I kidding, ESPECIALLY if it's about human suffering), but he/she/it has moved beyond comedy and into the banal.

Bubble Bubble, toil and troublePoopheads yell and misogynists mumbleTry to make any sense of thisIt still adds up to less than pissNow who created all this fuss?Let's go ask Anonymous!Obsessed with his trouser snakeHe will not give us a breakExhausting all belief suspensionPoor thing only wants attention!

Hershele - I think "scumbags get laid" comes not from a misunderstanding of scumbaggery but of niceness. A guy is "nice"--that is, deliberately and awkwardly solicitous, not nice--to girls and it fails to get him a submissive gorgeous girlfriend in the first week, so he decides that niceness doesn't work and he better do the opposite.

That's also one of the hypotheses. Actually, I think it might be a clearer phrasing of what I said. A (geniuinely) nice guy isn't self-effacing and obsequious; he listens to what the inividual woman he's interacting with wants (and, where he wants something incompatible, weighs that against how invested she is in getting it against how much he wants to he have sex/a relationship/whatever with her). But he may not do what the complainer thinks of as How To Treat An Instance Of The Class "Women."

$100/week for groceries?

I don't really remember, I esitmated.

Yahoo!Answers - a great place to argue with assholes

Where have you been spending your time on the Internet that you need to go to Y!Answers to argue with assholes?

The woman often steals the used condom right out of the garbage so that she can be a gold-digger and mooch child support off of the man.

I no longer think it's even possible that this particular anon is serious.

You know, I swear these fuckheads are going to turn me into a cultural feminist. I mean as much as the moon June womb mystical hey nonny nonny crowd makes me eyesprain (not to mention the rampant transphobia and so on and so forth), at a certain point, reading these fucknuts, you have to ask:

Dude, so: essentially, you, what, sprang from your pater's forehead whole, did you? Because, seriously, all this fucking pissing and moaning about what drains on men women are and boyo, in case you never noticed: without at least one woman, you *wouldn't be here at all.* No, I am not referring to the lady who gave you a mercy handjob so you wouldn't top yourself back in '92, either.

"The woman often steals the used condom right out of the garbage so that she can be a gold-digger and mooch child support off of the man."

OFTEN? Wow, this is totally how I got pregnant! How did he know? I laugh and think "sucker!" on days like when my husband takes our little daughter out to the Home Depot Kids Workshop to make little projects together. I've fooled him into thinking he's happy! Money, money, money by the pound!

So, I'm thinking Mr. Butt Slut gets all his information from soap operas. Of course there's no such thing as a man who WANTS to be a father! I also love how as a full-time mother, I am simultaneously doing the only right and proper thing for raising children, but I am also a lazy ass, money-sucking, gold-digger who shouldn't be entitled to jack shit. Just like how you, Holly, are simultaneously a slut while being repulsive to men. Actually this whole thing is based around an incredible cognitive dissonance: women are vile creatures barely above the cognitive level of children who will make you work like a dog and take everything you've got while "cuckolding" you with every hot delivery boy that walks by (which is the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone ever), but every man should aspire to having at least 3 of them at a time. The stupid...it burns.

Whatever. Let's hope they keep spending all their time sucking each other's dicks on websites rather than getting out among the public.

Sodini is also a weird case because his PUA guru was R. Don Steele, who is known for the concrete nature of his "makeover" advice rather than emotional engagement with women and being willing to fuck really ugly women, and he (Sodini) started an online journal of his terror plot, whereas most PUA disciples start online journals of their dates and pick-up attempts. On the theory that people document and plan what they really want to do, we can say that Sodini really wanted to be a spree killer and not a PUA.

Publicly funded daycare scares me. Mostly due to the first word. Also, I'd rather raise my own children if at all possible. Both sentiments stem from my misanthropy, I don't like people as a general rule. In my opinion, the human race is on a collision course with an oblivion of our own making, and we are still accelerating.

On a slightly lighter note, I love how the posts on this blog remind me of this webcomic panel: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/At least I'm willing to put an identity behind my idiocy and belligerence!